Before establishing your keyword strategy it’s important to pay attention to several factors that play a big part in keyword selection. It’s not only about the volume of searches or the difficulty of a keyword that goes into the decision process. There are a number of considerations that must be factored into the overall strategy to make the best decisions on your keyword targeting.
Target realistic goals
When researching keywords, you must take into consideration the difficulty of the terms you’re considering. Google will rank authority websites over smaller, newer websites in most cases. Choosing a difficult keyword to target could mean wasting your time and resources on a task that could potentially take years to achieve. A keyword strategy should include long-term goals and short-term wins.
Google loves authority websites
It should be noted that simply optimizing for a single keyword is not the goal. Your website should be optimized for an entire keyword topic. To get the most variations of important keywords your page needs to provide the most value to users. There are different ways to do this but the easiest one is to adequately cover a topic in its entirety.
Pages should target the intent of a search term but you’re also looking for related content that users are also looking for when they search. Your research should be topic-oriented to include the most important aspects that are linked to the keyword. Therefore, blog content or resource content becomes crucial to developing websites. These pages provide additional information that users are looking for, which in turn provide more traffic.
Website’s that publish content to answer as many questions as possible will keep more users on-site. The more content your website appears in the top of the search results (for content that’s directly related to your niche), the more trust your website builds with search engines.
Finding popular search terms and creating content to satisfy the search intent is a huge aspect of ranking highly for difficult keywords.
Volume of searches vs. business value
The monthly volume of searches should be evaluated in comparison to business value. A keyword with 5 searches a month may not be a worthwhile pursuit since if the conversion rate is 1 in a 1000. There’s not enough traffic to make an impact on lead generation.
Depending on your business, one client may be worth $50k if you’re a surgeon or commercial real estate agent. In this case, your strategy may include optimizing for hundreds of keywords that may have little to no traffic but have huge payoffs when they hit.
The volume of traffic from a keyword is always assessed in comparison to the potential value to the business.
Keyword relevance
The relevance of a keyword determines the success of your page. If your keyword does not meet a user’s expectations the page will not rank. Even if the page ranks initially, when too many people back off your page it will be thrown down off the first page.
To this point, the content that you have on your page must be highly relevant and be among the best that’s already performing in the search results. As mentioned before, Google wants to show the best results to a search query. If your page doesn’t outperform the competition, how could you expect to rank ahead of them?